It's incredible to me that years later we are dealing with another set of life threatening quality issues in Boeing 737 MAX planes which can all be traced to the company deciding to optimize for shareholder value instead of listening to its engineers.
@carnage4life "it was found to be saying things that weren’t true" what kind of fucked up sentence is this is, we have to invent a word for that concept
@carnage4life It won’t help that they have a near-captive market. An airline with a significant Boeing fleet will see high switching costs if they have to retrain pilots for Airbus certification.
Ryanair has nearly 600 Boeing aircraft. They occasionally threaten to go Airbus in negotiations with Boeing but few people would believe that they actually would.
@lennardvanotterloo@carnage4life Oh, it's worse than. Pilots need to be certified on a particular model series. The 737 is 55 years old. It still sells because airlines have a lot of 737 certified pilots. The cockpit of a modern 737 is a pretty funny mix of really old instruments along with spot updates to the latest tech where it won't require pilot re-training.
A lot of the bad engineering decisions in the 737MAX design were motivated by the requirement to retain pilot certification.
@carnage4life and we knew too! The MAX has had constant reporting on how it was designed and built for years! They went from accounting for every speck of metal shavings to loosing tools inside the aircraft!
“Robison explained that the leadership focus was centered on cost containment. He looked at one engineer’s evaluation that said ideas are measured in dollars. Another engineer was given specific performance and time requirements tied to reducing costs. The culture became one stemming from the idea that corporate executives ultimately make the best decisions about allocating resources, and ultimately about safety.“
@carnage4life reminds me of “The system isn’t broken, it’s designed this way”.
I don’t think Boeing did any systemic changes and thus everything remains the same.
@carnage4life I used to know a software engineer who worked for Boeing. He had already left by the time the 737 Max software issue started causing planes to plunge into the ground; he expressed concern when the company started delegating critical engineering decisions to people other than engineers in order to save on costs. What's the point of cost savings when it causes so much damage?? 🫠 Boeing needs to be fined billions for these shenanigans.
@abesamma@carnage4life Politicians making medical decisions, programmers making engineering decisions, engineers making UI decisions, youtubers making pandemic decisions...
@danjac@carnage4life The thing is, many of the shareholders from when these decisions were made likely benefited from the cost cutting and sold their shares before the consequences hit. Optimizing for shareholder value basically means optimizing for near-future company performance. Terrible thing to optimize for if you want a company that will remain successful years down the line.
@gunther@danjac@carnage4life particularly when you’re building aircraft, which last for decades! A poorly built aircraft can easily be 40 years of liability & PR risk for the company (not to mention its risk to its actual occupants).
@thatandromeda@gunther@danjac@carnage4life To the company sure but not to the shareholders. You can sell and take your profit and if the plane crashes they cannot claw back that value. So from the psychopathic Wall Street perspective it still works.
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